Reliability Society Newsletter

 

Vol. 59, No. 1. February 2013

President's Message



Reliability Society Members,

Hello, thank you for your continued Reliability Society (RS) membership. Welcome to all of our new RS members. I greatly appreciate your membership.

I am sure that your New Year is well underway and that 2013 is being kind to each of you.

Congratulations

At our January RS AdCom meeting and our Awards Banquet, our elected 2013-2015 AdCom members were congratulated. To highlight, the elected 2013-2015 AdCom members are:

  • Marsha Abramo
  • Loretta Arellano
  • Lon Chase
  • Rex Sallade
  • Shiuhpyng Winston Shieh
  • Alfred Stevens

Also at our January RS AdCom meeting and our Awards Banquet, our 2013 Officers were congratulated. Our 2013 RS Officers are:

  • President: Dennis Hoffman
  • Jr. Past President: Jeff Voas
  • VP Meetings and Conferences: Alfred Stevens
  • VP Membership: Marsha Abramo
  • VP Publications: Phil Laplante
  • VP Technical Activities: Eric Wong
  • Secretary: Joe Childs
  • Treasurer: Christian Hansen

Starting this year, the AdCom members agreed to allow each Officer to have a Deputy to aid / support and learn the details concerning that office. The Officer Deputies were also congratulated. I am very glad for the Deputy positions. The 2013 RS Officer Deputies are:

  • Meetings and Conferences VP Deputy: Jeff Voas
  • Membership VP Deputy: Lon Chase
  • Publications VP Deputy: Shiuhpyng Shieh
  • Technical Activities VP Deputy: Lou Gullo
  • Treasurer: Bob Loomis

There were two RS Awards given at the Awards Banquet. The first was the Lifetime Achievement Award which went to Louis Blazy for accomplishments over four decades in the federal government and academia in creating highly reliable systems for the CIA, NASA, FBI, and FDA. The second was the Engineer of the Year Award presented to Angelos Stavrou, Professor at George Mason University, for accomplishments in mobile applications and devices, reliability and security, and excellence in software engineering education and research.

The IEEE Long Island Section sent a letter to Scott Abrams, a RS AdCom member, advising him that he had been selected for the Alex Gruenwald Award with the citation "for encouraging young people to pursue engineering and his exemplary leadership and technical contributions to reliability engineering". Scott noted that Alex Gruenwald was an IEEE pioneer in the area of professional activities, was a very active member of the Long Island Section, and an IEEE Region 1 Director. Scott will receive this Award at the IEEE Long Island Section Awards Banquet on March 21. This is especially nice for Scott because of his RS participation and involvement. Congratulations, Scott.

New Conference

A new IEEE Conference on Reliability Science for Advanced Materials and Devices (RSAMD) (www.csmspace.com/events/rsamd/), being held at Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, on February 24-25, 2013, was initiated and headed by Carole Graas, an AdCom member and the Conference Chair. Per the Program Overview, "The Driving philosophy is that reliability science shares attributes common to all technologies, and that solutions and understandings developed in one technology may indeed be applicable to others. As such, the conference will provide dedicated time for educational lectures and peer-to-peer interactions through dynamic workshops of fundamental subjects of interest to all, in addition to contributed papers and posters." Thanks, Carole.

European Conference Involvement

Prof. Benoit Iung, Nancy Research Centre for Automatic Control (CRAN) at Lorraine University in Nancy, France, and I had originally met at the WCEAM conference in Cincinnati, Ohio. Benoit, a RS member, and I stayed in contact, and he attended and presented at our RS PHM Conferences.

In early 2012, Benoit requested that I present a Keynote at their IFAC A-MEST Workshop, "Maintenance for Dependability, Asset Management, and PHM" to be held on November 22-23, 2012, in Seville, Spain. After considerations, discussions with my wife, company okay, I accepted his invitation to visited his beautiful Nancy and his University. Benoit asked me to give an IEEE Reliability Society presentation at his University and his Professor Researchers also presented to me. Very nice.

There were three Keynote speeches at their IFAC A-MEST Workshop:

  • IEEE PHM Vision: PHM Issues, Trends and Challenges, by me;
  • New trends and challenges in Maintenance Modelling, by Philip Scarf, Professor of Applied Statistics, Salford Business School, Editor IMA Journal of Management Mathematics;
  • The usual suspects in reliability and risk analysis: complex systems, uncertainty, prediction, by Enrico Zio, Chair on Systems Science and Energetic Challenge, European Foundation for New Energy-Electricite' de France, at Ecole Centrale Paris and Supelec, Paris, Professor at Energy Department, Politecnico di Milano, Chairman of the European Safety and Reliability Association (ESRA). Enrico is an IEEE Reliability Society member and has been and is active within the Milano, Italy, RS Chapter (the Chair). I have known Enrico for many years.

Prof. Adolfo Crespo Marquez, Industrial Management at University of Seville, was the IFAC A-MEST Workshop Chair and is a very nice person and I am glad that I got to meet him. The IFAC A-MEST Workshop was held at his University in Seville.

Prof. Benoit Iung was a gracious host throughout our visit to France and Spain. In Nancy, we visited classic architectures and museums. Nancy is on the east side of France, east of Paris, with lots of history as does Seville, in southwest Spain. We met Benoit's family -- his wife, their two daughters and son.

On our return, we had one day in Paris; Benoit asked friends of his to meet us for a short walk through Paris. We then had supper with Pierre Dersin and his wife. Pierre is one of our elected IEEE Reliability Society AdCom members.

RS Topic Directors

A number of the RS Topic Area Director positions are still available. The Director is to focus on their topic area, know a lot of contacts / experts for their area, and help identify / gain involvement with those persons to be active in a technical area within the RS. Each Director will help expand the technical aspects (conferences, technical committees, webinars, special sections for T-Rel publication, Standards, etc) by identifying it to the appropriate RS Vice President. Each Director will be agreed with by the ExCom, approved by the AdCom, and appointed by the RS President. Each Director needs to be an IEEE and RS member. Annually, each Director can attend a scheduled joint ExCom and AdCom meeting (as requested by the ExCom) to present their Topic Area plans / plan status. Their travel expense will be reimbursed at the maximum level as the AdCom defined allowable travel expense amount. I hope that a number of RS members will be interested in one of the Director positions or can recommend someone to be a Director. Let me know your interest or if want to discuss with me. Email me at d.hoffman@ieee.org.

Reminders:

Visit our RS web site (http://rs.ieee.org) often. It is the gateway to the many resources that the RS makes available in the broad aspects of reliability. The Reliability Society can and does help create a win-win situation for you and the RS in this current dynamic, world-wide technology environment. By being active within the RS, you can interact with many of the "movers and shakers" in this broad reliability discipline.

Conference proceedings are available for access in the Reliability Digital Library (RDL). As an RS member you get complete and free access to everything in the RDL. The RDL can be accessed at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/guesthome.jsp. Sign in with your IEEE user id and password and then click on "What can I access?". Then select the IEEE Reliability Society Conference Digital Library. This will bring up links to all the conference proceedings that are available.

RS members should consider being involved at some level within the Reliability Society. Your involvement can be in your local RS Chapter, in RS Conference Management Committees, within one of the RS Officer Committees, in being a Chair or active member in a Technical Committees, in a Standards development team, etc. It is also very great for our RS members to be an author for our RS publications or LOR (Letter on Reliability). Please consider.

Thanks to each of you for your Reliability Society membership.

Best regards,

Dennis Hoffman
2013 RS President
d.hoffman@ieee.org

 

From the Editor

In this February issue of Reliability Society Newsletter, President Dennis Hoffman begins with a congratulation message of a list of awarded RS members in the January AdCom meeting and award banquet event. Other than the congratulation message, the president also introduces a new conference event in Colorado and the conference involvement in Europe. The new conference event in Colorado is on the topic of Reliability Science for Advanced Materials and Devices. About the involvement of European conference, President Dennis Hoffman gave a brief introduction to the IFAC A-MEST workshop involvement in Spain and the visit to Lorraine University in Nancy, France. He also would like to remind the readers about the opening positions of RS topic director. The description of the role is included in the message and President Dennis Hoffman welcomes RS members to participate in one of the opening RS topic director positions.

There are 3 regular articles available in this February issue. The first article titled as "Quadrant II, the Sweet Spot of Six Sigma" by Dr. Samuel Keene. The Quadrant II activities are the activities of problem prevention and opportunity harvesting, and the Six Sigma implementation promotes companies to spend more effort on the Quadrant II opportunities. Based on the giving description, Dr. Samuel Keene gave an example that demonstrates the concept. In the second article, IEEE Std 1332-2012 Published, Mr. Louis Gullo briefly describes the IEEE Std 1332-2012 standard that was introduced under the leadership of Dr. Michael Pecht, Dr. Michael Azarian and the author of the article. The last article, Cloud Computing Issues, introduced the issues of cloud computing by Goutam Kumar Saha. The article describes the definition of cloud computing, and the challenges of cloud computing in all aspects in terms of availability, security, recovery and management.

The Newsletter has been the society's primary media for sharing thoughts on reliability related issues and announcements of events of interest to our members. This newsletter will publish content deemed appropriate for and of interest to members of the IEEE Reliability Society and members of the reliability profession in general. Accepted content includes announcements and reports of activities sponsored by the Reliability Society including chapter meetings, workshops and conferences. Technical papers including reviews, opinions, case studies or new ideas for the reliability professional are welcomed and accepted without external review. Authors are solely responsible for the correctness of results presented and proper citation of work by others. For submissions to Prognostic Health Management (PHM) section, please contact Dr. Pradeep Lall who is the editor handling the PHM section. For further information please contact Dr. Lall.

Deadlines for submission of content:

May 1 (Issue No. 2/2013)
Aug. 1 (Issue No. 3/2013)
Nov. 1 (Issue No. 4/2013)
Feb. 1 (Issue No. 1/2014)

I would like to thank the RS Officers, AdCom members, Chapter chairs and members at large who have contributed to this issue. I sincerely hope our members can continue sharing your thoughts through our newsletter.

If you have any suggestions or comments on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me at your convenience.

Sincerely,

Shiuhpyng Winston Shieh, PhD
Newsletter Editor-in-Chief

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